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Minagoroshi no Otome (2024)

2025-03-30

Minagoroshi no Otome is a real mess. a not-insignificant part of me appreciates the sheer audacity and commitment to the bit of making something this unabashedly messy and ridiculous, but... it just doesn't really work for me.

the elephant in the room with this game is that it's pretty clear they were pressed for time, money, or both. there are quite a few typos; everything has 'em, no matter how many times and how many people you have proofreading, but it was distracting enough that i was like, "huh." also, the voice lines are recorded *really* sloppily--lines clip the mic SO much, and some characters are mixed significantly louder than others. it's kind of baffling that the game released in this state, and these things combined with the extremely rushed nature of the story really makes me feel like this could have used more time in the oven.

i started writing about the broad strokes of the story before realizing how ridiculously complicated it sounds. (also i don't have a good enough memory to properly detail everything.) that's the point, i suppose, because the game reveals to the player that all of this setup, all of this detailed lore painstakingly explained throughout the first two scenarios, is all fake. the story of Minagoroshi no Otome is, in-universe, a farce played out again and again for hundreds of years, puppeteered by one of the Celestial Beings that Towa and the cast are trying to destroy. the bad guys have already won, basically, and now the cast are just action figures being smashed against each other. that in itself is a really interesting twist that i enjoy a lot--it raises the question of, "does your characters acknowledging and wholeheartedly hating the fact that your plot and lore are stupid as hell excuse the fact that it is stupid as hell?" and i don't really know the answer to that on a macro scale. by the end of MNO, though, i can say that it definitely didn't work in this case. man. it just does not do it for me.

i'll compare MNO to Dead End Aegis for a moment here (even though i know i shouldn't): one of the greatest strengths of DEA is how, despite how off the wall the lore is, it's actually a very well-told critique of realistic subject matter like the military industrial complex and institutional misogyny. MNO, on the other hand, doesn't have that kind of focus on social commentary at all, and i think that's to its detriment because the craziness of the plot isn't enough to carry the experience. the closest i think MNO comes to this is the portrayal of human propensity for self-destruction. humans created Celestial Beings, and died at the hands of their own creations. even after Ayumu turns back time and does a full reset while giving humanity the knowledge required to avert this disaster, humanity consciously makes the decision to do it again. and it's even worse the second time. how do you prevent mass destruction then? is it even worth trying? does humanity deserve to live on after failing like this twice?

unfortunately, though, MNO doesn't really answer that question. instead, there's a neat little ending where the girls defeat the evil Celestial Being once and for all, have a heart-to-heart with the one remaining one before she dies, and live happily ever after... by, uh, becoming goddesses and watching over the world for over a thousand years. during that time they were also mistreated and assaulted by humanity multiple times, but they kept watching over humanity anyway. i have a million questions about this ending and epilogue. mainly: what the hell were they thinking? (this is directed towards the characters as well as Marutani, honestly.) is this worth it? are you really sure? after living for so long as pawns to a Celestial Being, now you want to be pawns to humanity instead? you don't want to live for yourselves? the more i think about the ending, the more dissatisfied i am with it. there's a universe in which MNO stuck the landing despite all the nonsense, but it's definitely not this one.

despite all my complaints, there are some really fun moments with this plot all throughout. i really enjoyed Ayumu's role and story in the third scenario, for example! and i actually think that she contextualizes a lot of that first "timeline" in a satisfying way. but then, towards the end of the second "timeline," she just kind of... gets pushed off screen in favor of giving Dee 11th hour magical girl status in a way that is, frankly, pretty annoying. (would "timeline" be the best way to refer to a situation post-timeline reset? i don't actually know. i'll just stick with calling it this.) there's such a huge rush to get everything tied up and explained in the end, but this wouldn't have been necessary if the story wasn't so convoluted in the first place. you played yourself. also, you don't have to explain everything. it's okay to leave some questions open. it's okay to just (David Lynch voice) [laughs] [does not answer].

for a specific example, here's something i mentioned on Discord:

this kind of thing just rankles me. it's SO annoying; it just feels like the author doesn't trust me to have thoughts.

there are some real flashes of brilliance in the character writing that call back to the heights achieved in Dead End Aegis; one of my favorite lines is in the second timeline, when Dee, being assaulted once again by faceless monsters after finally having a glimpse of a loving relationship with Towa, says: でも、ほかの関係なんてわからない。嬲ってもらう以外のかかわりなんてありえないんだ。("but i don't understand any other kind of relationship. anything other than being degraded is just impossible.") after experiencing a lifetime of abuse, it's impossible to imagine a relationship not rooted in it--so impossible that you can easily turn your back on a potentially loving and healthy relationship in favor of another abusive situation because you just can't wrap your mind around anything else. this one line rings so clearly i'm astounded by it. i'm also just kind of frustrated, because that means the potential was there! i'm not crazy! they could have told a really meaningful story about escaping from the control of higher authority and living for your own sake and for those you love! it was ripe for the taking, and they just didn't take it!

actually, i guess you can justify the lack of character progression by saying that the characters were just playing their roles in the in-universe MNO scenario, and they were designed to be flat on purpose. sure. (that's a really convenient plot setup for excusing a whole host of missteps in your writing. note that one down for future reference.) but then you would need the characters to make actual breaks from those roles after they get out from under the thumb of the scenario writer in order to really feel the impact of that? but Reika is the only one who does. Dee, despite having a different backstory in the second timeline, isn't meaningfully different in the end. most of the characters don't *really* change that much from where they were at, like, the end of the first scenario, except for Reika (who is the best character by far). so, if i were to be extremely uncharitable, that makes most of the game feel like a waste of time.

i won't be entirely that uncharitable, but this is my absolute biggest gripe with MNO. sooooooo much of the writing is focused on detailing the game's labyrinthine plot and lore, spanning hundreds (over a thousand, i guess) years, one overall timeline reset and countless individual resets of the same scenario, aliens, demigods, magical girls, gigantic monster men with monster cocks, all of the world's literature being rewritten to be yuri and have all mentions of sex and procreation removed, that most of the character writing is left by the wayside.

i do want to bang out my thoughts on the main cast, though. i'll go in order:

Towa is, starting off and throughout the first two scenarios, a really fascinating protagonist. i love how she starts, as a woman who's lost everything and has spent most of her life painstakingly planning out her revenge. she's driven by her anger, and that isn't treated like something that needs to be fixed--she's just fucking pissed off, and she's right to be so. this point of her character loses its teeth after the revelation that all of the lore is just fake, though, and it becomes mostly irrelevant regardless because of the extent to which Towa's character development is tied to her love for Dee. Towa really, really, really loves her. in the first timeline this is because they're written this way, but it's true even in the second timeline free from "author" influence--it's a real "they'd find each other in any universe" sort of deal. which is cute and all, but Towa is *so* mushy around Dee that it kind of sucks all the air out of the room and doesn't leave any room for anything else about her. she's super naive about the world (because she spent so much of her life dedicated to revenge)? that's prime fluff material for interactions with Dee. she has an unbreakable sense of justice? well, she can't stand by whenever Dee is in danger. she never gives up, even when things are hopeless? that's because she has to protect Dee. she has a hard time trusting people? that bites her in the ass when she doesn't trust Dee. i do enjoy the fluffy romantic angle with her, but there's a point where it gets to be a bit much. she is drop dead gorgeous, though. Metawo batted for 100 with her design.

Dee is, honestly, the most frustrating character. most of this is because of the missed potential that i touched on earlier, but... almost her entire character revolves around Towa. like usual, you could excuse this in the first timeline by saying that she was written to be that way. sure. that excuse works for everything. you've spent a good 75% or so of the game with this extremely one-dimensional Dee. but in the second timeline she's frightfully similar! even though she has a completely different backstory, and she's had a really horrific life! she was a slave! that's pretty crazy. she can't even imagine a life outside of constant sexual abuse and physical and verbal degradation. despite this treatment, she's never been able to stop herself from wanting to help and protect other people, even if (especially if) it comes at her own expense. she grew up in a society that denigrated her for being kind, because that was nothing more than a sign of fundamental weakness. i think this is really fascinating, but it's just too little too late. this is also just tied into her relationship with Towa--Towa represents something so much better, so much stronger than Dee, that she can't imagine any situation in which she deserves to stand by Towa's side as an equal. Towa is there to teach her that she's a wonderful person, to give her a loving relationship for the first time in her life. also, again, she's rewarded with 11th hour magical girl status because Ayumu has served her purpose so she gets punted out of the story. she has cute healing powers, which is thematically resonant, but by this point i was just really checked out. in MNO's insistence on having six main characters with three canon pairings, Dee suffers the most from being pigeonholed into Love Interest.

i like the glimpse you get into Elis at the end of the second scenario, when she's lost Serena and feels extremely bitter and jealous when she sees the loving relationship that Towa and Dee have. like, "that should be me. why does she get to have a loving partner with her when i don't?" but you never really get that particular thread of her character again after that. everything else is the logical extension of what you expect from her from her bio: she's bound by the sense of duty instilled in her from birth (as a character in the world created by the in-universe scenario writer?); she cares deeply about protecting the school and student body (even after she learns that that was all a lie); she loves Serena and trusts her with her life; she has a bit of rivalry with both Towa and Reika, because they both want what she has. she spends most of the final scenario locked away as the last person to realize what's going on, which i think works pretty well and tracks with her previously-established priorities. you also get to see her crack and turn away from reality when under pressure. i feel like the saddest thing with her is that there are a lot of unexplored aspects of her character... but that's true for most of them. another consequence of the almost single-minded focus on plot over character.

Serena probably has the most satisfying character arc after Reika. she starts off as the most entertaining character--her floaty dialogue and voice courtesy of Imaya Minami are a big part of this--and for a long while she was my favorite. i mean, she's a cute maid. she lovingly teases her master all the time. she eats like 2000 calories for breakfast. she always knows more than she lets on. she's surprisingly devious and cold-blooded when the situation calls for it, like when Elis' life is on the line. despite that, she does still care about the other characters; it's not like she *entirely* revolves around Elis, which is nice. you really see why Elis trusts Serena enough to ask Serena to kill her when push comes to shove, because Serena has it in her to make those kinds of hard calculations if she needs to. there are a lot of moments where she's really cool, like when she backstabs Reika by beating her to death with her shield--Serena does the shield-only run of Dark Souls for 99% of her fight scenes--and when she almost succeeds in suffocating Towa to death by trapping her in a shield bubble. there are some really inventive uses for a shield power here! i like that a lot. i think my only real complaint with her is just, like with everyone else, there isn't enough. you only get brief glimpses into what her inner monologue looks like, and i wanted more of that. there's one time where she mentally calls Towa a fucking slut for making Elis sad, which is extremely funny. i wanted more of that and less of the convoluted plot!

Reika is the star of the show for me. she goes from being a total evil bitch (already wonderful) to being a dummy who can't be honest with her feelings (also wonderful). like, she's so comically evil until the end that i already couldn't hate her; i love things like her making Towa believe that Dee is an evil biomechanical human sent by the Tsukikage family specifically to get close to her and then kill her, even though that's literally not true, or her being like "oh, i can just trap and torture Dee for 12 hours to lure Towa here, who gives a shit." it's just so evil it loops around to being funny. i can imagine a player being potentially turned off by her redemption, but... you can always excuse it by saying that the evil Reika was just a character. well, an in-universe character. after she's freed from the Minagoroshi no Otome scenario, she transforms from that comically evil bitch to, again, just kind of a dummy. she isn't stupid, certainly, but she's a bit slow on the uptake and extremely not honest with her feelings towards Izuna, Eri, Miri, and the rest of the cast. oh, Eri and Miri are androids that accompanied Reika throughout the scenario and did her every bidding; they even blow up on her command. so you see Reika go from treating them like pawns to valuing them as friends and human beings. she's even willing to sacrifice her life for them (and everyone else) by the end! Reika is the only character who goes through this level of transformation throughout MNO. which is unfortunate, because that means there *was* the potential for every character to have this kind of development... but that just didn't happen.

Izuna knows exactly how to bully her, too, which is a lot of fun. she's a lot smarter than you're led to believe at first, which juxtaposes well against Reika being a bit of a dunce. unfortunately, Izuna doesn't exist until the final scenario as anything other than Reika's partner who would get fridged at the beginning of every scenario run... and at that point it's a bit too late to really flesh her out properly. so i don't really have much to say about her, other than that she's funny.

i think that's about all i have to say. my opinion on the game has shifted a bit in the days since i finished it--i started writing this feeling extremely pissed off, but now i'm more just... whelmed, i guess. MNO isn't what i wanted it to be, that's for sure. i told myself going in that there was no way this game would measure up to Dead End Aegis but, like how i can't stop myself from negatively comparing every single mecha anime i watch to Zambot 3, i just can't help but still feel let down. nothing could ever measure up to the moment when Minori, stranded at the edge of the universe itself, literally, physically cannot give up on living. i knew that Minagoroshi no Otome very likely wouldn't hit those highs, but i can't help but feel disappointed by how it just doesn't come anywhere close to even halfway there. i'm kind of sad, but i'm still glad that this exists, that metalogiq exists, and that Ueda Metawo is still out there drawing beautiful people of all genders and awesome eroguro. even though there isn't enough of that in MNO whatever i'm done here.